Mashups Coming Fast and Furious
Last week was all about widgets, but now we’re onto mashups. It’s not so big a leap, really! In today’s edition, dispatches about mashup proliferation from 30 Boxes, BusinessWeek, ProgrammableWeb, and Google.
First up, 30 Boxes said today it was releasing tools to mash up any feed with its calendar interface. I played with “30 Boxed” this morning, and really liked how visually emphasizing the element of time makes it fast and simple to understand information. This looks especially good with feeds that include photos. See it in action on Thomas Hawk’s blog (as a widget, of course).
30 Boxed has a lot in common with what Facebook has done with their News Feed, giving at-a-glance news on any recent profile updates, photos, and other changes across your network. News Feed has become indispensable to me, and I would love to have something like it for to chronologically aggregate all of my friends and contacts’ activity across every other online social app. (This is part of what PeopleAggregator is trying to do, right?)
Meanwhile, BusinessWeek is running a package of stories on corporate use of mashups. The topics are quite scattered, but the mainbar is worth a look. It’s a step up from all the general pieces we’ve been seeing on the potential of “enterprise 2.0” (like what Wired News is running today).
Last night, John Musser of ProgrammableWeb posted to say new mashup submissions to his site have risen to more than 6 per day, with 17 added this weekend alone. That’s up from the 2.84 average per day he’s quoted on in the BusinessWeek piece.
Also today, Google said organizations using its Google Apps for Your Domain could now mash up apps and widgets to create custom start pages for internal use.